CoH Crashing to black screen under win7Pro64bit worked fine on WinXP

I have recently upgraded although now wish I hadn't to win7pro 64bit. My fav. game of all time Company of Hero's just doesn't like win7 and for that matter it use to crash in Vista 32bit as well which was one main reason I went back to WinXp all that time ago.

I have all the correct and most up to date drivers considering the age of the machine, althought creative drivers for my XFI gamer card are not WHQL but there is not much I can do about that, the internet is littered with complaints about that.

C2D E6600 @ 3,3Ghz prime stable
MSI 6PN 680i SLI
GeForce 260 max core
Kingston 4gig Hyper X ram (unlinked)
Corsair 620HX PSU

I play mostly comp stomps with a dutch friend both standard and custom maps that we make. I can play for hours without a problem or can play less than 20 mins and it happens

I will be moving units around the playing map and although I can hear the SFX nothing on the screen is moving looks like a screen shot but I can still scroll around the whole map although it is all static. The num lock key will go off and on so pc isn't locked up totally. After no more than 2 mins I will no longer be able to move around the static screen but can still hear the SFX, then a further 2 mins the whole screen will go black and num lock will NOT go on or off so PC is totally locked up. If I try and press CTRL+ALT+DEL I just get to the black screen quicker.

I have tried the compatibility mode (Vista and WinXp Sp3 and Sp2) as well as enabling run as admin. I have the correct port forwarded on my router. I have no AV software or firewall installed whilst I am trying diagnose this problem.

Any ideas please peeps would be great, if not I am installing XP again.

Any ideas?

Got settings on ultra high? If so turn them down to high as Ultra crashes the game

Will do and test, thanks for that . Still seems weird to me on the timing of the error since early game there isn't much going on explosion wise. I do like the eye candy when doing a creeping barrage.

I have also taken all my security off and it hasn't (touch wood crashed yet, but as soon as I put it back on it locks up within 2 games) Can running 32 bit AV programs (AVG, Avast) hinder the 64bit OS in any way?

Nothing seems to come close to the eye candy on CoH. That game still blows me away with the amount of fun that can be had. The effects make other rts games look very poor, only now SC2 seems to get beyond it in visual terms (4 years since).

Well I turned it down and it ran 6 whole games from 30mins to a massive 2 hour battle fine. Then i put up Lyon was 25mins in and it happened so still no fix, win7 starting to get on my (. Y .)'s

It's almost like I have a memory leak or something.

Sounds to me like a hardware error more than anything. Unstable ram perhaps? Set all your overclocks back to stock and see what happens. Also run memtest and see what happens.

Have been using Win7 since RC and CoH has always run fine. Afraid it's something in your setup that's the issue not the OS.

Goldfingers has been hacking my webcam AGAIN!! I have done just that everything is stock, fresh install of Win7 done tonight and just installing the last 5 relic downloader torrent thingy ma jiggs. Although the CPU was clocked I just unlinked the RAM and kept it standard. Although I have to set the RAM manually because the mobo thinks it is 800Mhz ram when its not. Kingston Hyper X 5-5-5-15 2.2v 1068 Mhz.

I do recall this same issue back when Vista came out as well though. I had a 32bit retail copy as a birthday present, would get 15/20mins into a game and it would just crash, although I had a 8800GTX then.

TheMightyTen do you run CoH with compatibility mode or run as admin? Or just some port forwarding?

EDIT: RAM memtest86'ed with no errors and the Raptor was treated to WD diag tools again with no errors.

I am running a 24" monitor I should be able to run native res. (1920x1200) for game at high on a 260 maxx core 216 shouldn't I? Or should I just run it on low to test if it will still crash?

Tried running Prime95 again under 64-bit? With your GTX260 + a 32-bit OS you might not have been testing all the RAM you now have under 64-bit.

So after some testing still have a problem plus I can add some more detail.

SYSTEM is 100% stock now with NO overclocking

C2D E6600 @ 2.4Ghz prime stable
MSI 6PN 680i SLI
GeForce 260 max core
Creative X-Fi gamer sound card
Kingston 4gig Hyper X ram (unlinked)
Corsair 620HX PSU
Win7 Pro 64bit

The error has very slightly changed since above if I leave/wait long enough with the 1 second segment repeating over and over the PC will recover however by then CoH would have dropped the other player. Again it is almost like there is something causing 100% CPU usage within windows.

1.I have no firewall on, including windows own one
2.I have no windows defender on
3.Auto Updates are turned off
4.I have no AV or Mailware software installed

AFAIK there is nothing running that could be scanning my system and causing error.

I have done memtest 86 and WD drive tools both return as being OK.

I have recently started playing WAR and although again I don't totally crash out I will hear a "click" all sound will stop for a good 3-5mins then all of a sudden sound will be restored like nothing has happened. Thinking it might be the sound card I took it out and started using onboard but the same happens.

Are there any stupid setting I have over looked here, I remember a Vista problem about having to set the sound to a certain Mhz or bit rate to stop conflicts, anything like this?

Probably a total long shot, but on my Laptop (Vista 32Bit) I ran COH absolutely fine on Ultra for ages.... until one day the thing just started to chug and I mean running the game on Low would still leave me with something silly like 10FPS, the game was unplayable.

Now I know it sounds like a different problem to yours, but for some reason if I had any Firefox process running it would randomly hog my CPU 100%... killing everything else in essence.

Im not techincal enough to understand why, but I uninstalled Firefox and all was back to normal. Now whether I had a virus or some add-on with Firefox that was crippling it I dont know, but that was the problem for me... so maybe check if Firefox (if you are running it) is not chewing up CPU in the background?

I am a Chrome fan boy tbh stopped using fireox for a while now. thanks for the input however, I am just sure it is something I am over looking. Would be a shame to go back to XP just because of a game however as the shiny shiny bits of win7 are growing on me.

EDIT: What about a BIOS setting could that cause the above problems?